“I’m so bad, I’m distinctive!”: How Gary Numan defended his “machine music” in 1979
There’s an old Kate Bush TV interview clip from 1979 that’s gone a wee bit viral in recent weeks, in which a then 21-year-old Bush remarks on what she thinks the 1980s might sound like. “I think it’s gonna be very sci-fi,” she correctly guesses, noting that the success of films like Star Wars and Alien would inspire something “to go with them” from the music world.
“In fact,” Bush adds, “The newest thing is Gary Numan. In England, he’s just gone berserk. People are mad over this guy and his music. I really feel that the synth sound he’s getting is really the equivalent to the beautiful sci-fi.”
Kate went on to predict that synth music would take over and then probably not last very long, which was correct in terms of the blowback of the 1990s and quite wrong in the grand scheme. But in any case, Bush’s assessment of Gary Numan is quite a perceptive and lovely take on a new artist who wasn’t being entirely embraced by the rock music establishment at the time, including the original Starman himself. Numan’s number one UK hit singles in 1979, Tubeway Army’s ‘Are Friends Electric’ and his solo debut ‘Cars’, felt remarkably fresh and boundary pushing to the kids who bought them, but sounded more like another nail in the coffin of rock n’ roll to folks already crying over the unearthly sounds of disco and DEVO.
Gary Numan, interestingly enough, was the same age as Kate Bush—just 21 and put in a position to explain himself and his art to a polarised public. In one chat with the Manchester Evening News in December of ‘79, he seemed a little bit sick of the criticism – the constant association of his work with soulless “machine music” – and decided to push back with the distinctly British strategy of self-deprecation.
“I’m just doing what I can,” Numan said. “I can’t sing. I can’t really play an instrument. I suppose I’m so bad, I’m distinctive!”
Numan had actually come up as a guitar player and was hardly just up there pushing random keys on his Minimoog synthesizer, but he knew that making fun of himself deprived journalists of some of their own ammunition.
As Kate Bush might have guessed, Numan was a big science-fiction fan, and with both Tubeway Army and his new solo work, he took the opportunity to combine the Moog’s space-movie tones with lyrical themes pulled from the pages of Philip K Dick and JG Ballard. It was, indeed, a new kind of sci-fi music. Or was it, as some of the gatekeepers of the new electronic music were already claiming, a poppy rip-off of the work other artists had already been doing?
“Of course I’ve learned from Kraftwerk and Ultravox,” Numan clarified, “But I’ve added all sorts of textures. I find Kraftwerk very staccato and basic. I’ve given it a richer feel.”
Poor Gary. When you’re on top of the world, people will start taking shots at you from all directions. For a punk kid from London essentially experimenting with new tech and topping the charts with it, though, the last laugh was usually his.
“People say my music is machine music,” Numan said. “Well, machines are great. Disco is machine music. You can dance to my material. I’m fascinated by machines. That’s why my songs are full of references. I sing about the future, what might happen.”
What happened, as Kate Bush foresaw and Gary Numan pioneered, was the 1980s: when machine music still included human involvement.
